AI smackdown: How a new FTC ruling just protected the free press

I couldn’t be more delighted to be the bearer of such bad news. If you’re a digital media company whose revenue comes from publishing AI-generated articles and fake product reviews which pose as journalism, then Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina “The Lion” Khan just landed on your wallet with a WWE-style People’s Elbow-drop from the top-rope. So you might wanna lawyer up, pal, because this one’s going to hit you where it hurts. 

It’s been almost a month since the new FTC rule was officially approved, but if you still can’t smell what The Rock-a-Khan is cooking, here’s the slo-mo replay: Every time one of these fake-news jerks gets caught posting phony AI-generated “best lists,” Uncle Sam is free to slap them with a bill for $51,744 per violation. 

And lest the wanna-be bullies of public relations (like those called out in a 2021 Mother Jones’ barnburner Amazon exposé) feel left out, the FTC now has a little section of rules just for them, barring product review suppression. 

Per the ruling, that means it’s a violation for “anyone to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation in response to a consumer review… to (1) prevent a review or any portion thereof from being written or created, or (2) cause a review or any portion thereof to be removed, whether or not that review or a portion thereof is replaced with other content.”

Finally, in case any slimeballs out there forgot, the FTC reminded them that independent consumer advocacy journalism isn’t for sale. The rule makes it a violation for a business to “provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative, regarding the product, service or business.”

In its more standardized form across the journalism industry, this kind of ethical nihilism has been a rusty shank to the gut of consumer advocacy journalists the last few years. The long-trusted sources you’ve gone to for the straight dope on the latest gadget or tech news — like The Verge, Consumer Reports, Tom’s Hardware, CNET, Ars Technica, TechCrunch — have been watching a horrorshow happen on their journalistic turf, as private equity firms took advantage of cheap debt to buy up and cannibalized credible sites in slash-and-burn fashion. 

The zeitgeist-defining moment came last year when The Verge and Futurism busted multi-tentacled media vampire Red Ventures in a ripping series of stories. After buying up legacy tech news and review site CNET in 2020 for $500 million, the billionaire-led muppets at Red Ventures started quietly shoving AI-generated reviews and articles down the throats of readers via the hijacked credibility of actual tech journalism. (Disclosure: I previously worked at CNET.)

Even more humiliating for the storied masthead, the AI articles were riddled with errors. Thus commenced a deer-in-headlights freeze on AI garbage spewing, and some embarrassing public backpedaling by those who survived repeated rounds of layoffs.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

Why would that kind of thing happen? Why would private equity vultures skin a perfectly shear-able sheep? And why did the FTC have to go as far as making a whole new rule about fake reviews?

Because, whether they are on an Amazon product page or on a once-trustworthy media site, AI-generated fake reviews are among the most effective money-minting scams you can pull on readers — but to pull it off most profitably, the tech part of the equation requires you to use an already credible website as your puppet.

There are plenty of variations on this theme, but generally AI-generated reviews make money for a site in two ways. First, you deceive Google’s page-crawlers into thinking your reviews are providing a helpful and educational service of unbiased consumer journalism. That’s accomplished by gaming Google’s search engine optimization rules to get your AI-generated garbage to the top of a search results page for whatever product or service people are likely to be searching for.

Then you try to exploit the nuance of Google’s algorithm by gearing your site toward Google monetization under-the-hood — and then, finally, you repeat the process ad nauseam to generate a prolific flood of AI-generated copy.

Once you’ve done this, you are now effectively driving a flood of site traffic toward affiliate-revenue generating links. (To be clear: There are plenty of squeaky clean and completely transparent ways that affiliate revenue is routinely and ethically incorporated into the business models of upright journalism outlets.) But you’re also artificially inflating the value of your digital real estate, so you charge advertisers more to get ads on your site, or buy a few column inches of (hopefully visibly disclosed) sponsored content.

"The FTC has seen a massive increase in online reviews in the past few years," FTC ad-practices director Serena Viswanathan said in a recent CBS News interview. "We're all using them now to make decisions on whether to buy a product, where to stay on vacation. But unfortunately, with the rise in online reviews we have seen that bad actors can manipulate or fake reviews to deceive consumers for their own benefit."

Toward that end, the new rule also prevents secretly advertising for yourself while pretending to be an independent outlet or company. It bars “the creation or operation of websites, organizations or entities that purportedly provide independent reviews or opinions of products or services but are, in fact, created and controlled by the companies offering the products or services.”

In an earlier statement, FTC Consumer Protection Bureau head Sam Levine, said the new rule “should help level the playing field for honest companies.”

“We're using all available means to attack deceptive advertising in the digital age,” he said.

After years of personally fighting professional ethics battles as a journalist — fighting against layoffs where AI waits in the wings, arguing about transparency disclosures to editors who should know better, listening to lie after lie from mealymouthed middle managers, archiving into the wee hours so bylined authors could avoid having future opinions stuffed into their mouths — after all that, this new rule may not mean much to others, but it means a hell of a lot to me. 

It may not cover everything we hope for — and the courts’ interpretation of the rule in the context of Section 230 will set much of the tone — but this is a fine start. This is a vindication. The FTC couldn’t have stopped Red Ventures from sucking CNET dry. But the next time a company like that tries to make a meal out of a masthead, The Lion might just eat them alive.